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posted by martyb on Wednesday June 28 2017, @11:43PM   Printer-friendly
from the are-you-a-net-gain-or-a-net-drain? dept.

Many jobs have spillover effects on the rest of society. For instance, the value of new treatments discovered by biomedical researchers is far greater than what they or their employers get paid, so they have positive spillovers. Other jobs have negative spillovers, such as those that generate pollution.

A forthcoming paper, by economists at UPenn and Yale,1 reports a survey of the economic literature on these spillover benefits for the 11 highest-earning professions.

There's very little literature, so all these estimates are very, very uncertain, and should be not be taken literally. But it's interesting reading.

Here are the bottom lines – see more detail on the estimates below. (Note that we already discussed an older version of this paper, but the estimates have been updated since then.)

(Emphasis in original retained.)

At the top, researchers who generate +$950,440 in positive externalities; at the bottom, financiers who generate -$104,000 in negative externalities. In a glaring omission, telephone sanitisers were not listed.


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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 29 2017, @10:12PM (2 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 29 2017, @10:12PM (#533125)

    The FDA would love to have a 100% approval rate

    No, they really wouldn't. It isn't that 90% is special, it is that deviations from the usual lead to questions being asked of the administrators: "Are you saying the last guy sucked at his job because people under him approved too many/few new treatments?" Then you make political adversaries. Btw, I didn't come up with this idea on my own, I was told it.

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 29 2017, @10:30PM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 29 2017, @10:30PM (#533136)

    I was told it

    Well, I'll tell you differently: there is not a vast conspiracy at the FDA that is keeping good therapies off the market. There has also been a lot of political pressure to eliminate the requirement to show efficacy.

    You might not believe me, but how about an appeal to simple logic: Do you honestly believe that drug companies with billions of dollars on the line would sit on their hands and let the FDA arbitrarily deny them approvals?

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 29 2017, @10:50PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 29 2017, @10:50PM (#533151)

      I didn't describe a conspiracy. I described an incentive system that encourages a certain outcome. I also don't think drug companies are sitting on their hands, or that the denials are arbitrary (although you surely agree that, eg, alpha = 0.05 in 2 trials involves two arbitrary numbers). So your most recent post has nothing to do with my claims.